Despair
by allan
Summary: Unlucky in love, unlucky in cards, better forget it. (part four 'Di Di')


A letter waited on the mat.  Tinker didn't usually get post, the warding spell on his letterbox had been set to regurgitate junk mail like a shredder and it tended to unnerve the posties.

            Heaving a long sigh, he stretched out his hand.  The letter fluttered a couple of times and then it was twitching between his fingers like a broken butterfly.

Tinker didn't open it, didn't need to.  He could smell her perfume; patchouli was in again with the young artsy set.  Her handwriting on the envelope, the touch of her fingers still lingering.  

A 'Dear John' letter, and he'd felt it coming.  Little things, comments like: about time he gave up dope and absinthe, too old to ride so fast, on at him about his weirdo associates, needing her own space.  Plain scared.

Sarah was from a different generation while he was from a different world.  His world, where with just the saliva off this envelope flap and his scrying bowl, he could stalk her better than any Big Brother.  He could even make her believe two and two made five.  But that's called flesh puppetry, worse than wanking.  

It couldn't bring her back, of course, nothing could.  The affair officially closed; Desire had told Tinker in person.  She'd read him Sarah's letter before the ink was even dry, watched as the words cut into him.   Pleasure or pain, Desire is the personification of raw emotion; she just adores making us writhe.

Tinker got out Pocahontas, his Sport Scout bar-hopper.  Although she wasn't as fast as the Super Vee, that little flathead Indian would see him home drunk or sober.  Around town in second gear nothing could touch her, not when he got into a black mood.

The mood took him in one of many pubs.  There were dirty glasses on the table and an overflowing ashtray.  Definitely not the 'clean, well-lighted place' Hemingway would have chosen.

With sudden disgust, Tinker swept the table clean in a shattering of glass.  Other customers got out of his way as the landlord stormed over.  

Tinker turned and looked him in the eye.  "Your best friend's wife, when he's trucking long hauls," he said quietly, almost conversationally.  Another, bigger guy who'd pushed away from the bar as back-up suddenly froze.  "'Course it's their little Merry you're really after; what is she now, all of twelve?"

Riding along in the countryside, Tinker cursed himself for a total arsehole.  He needed to get drunk in a tavern that wouldn't bring out the worst in him, wouldn't let him get away with it—which pretty much narrowed it down to one.

He took the first left, the one after that, the next; tighter turns, steeper slopes.  Riding widdershins, with the sun and against the clock, spiraling back and down into… Underhill, and its 'Green Queen' hostelry, the inn-between worlds.  Not most folks' idea of fairyland, definitely not consensus reality.

The village itself looked about as rustic as Disney on acid and its denizens weren't minimum-wagers in costume.  "A man ca's canny in the hollow hills", his Scots mother would warn, diverting her wee son with ancient tales, too poor even for a radio.  Perhaps she'd seen the same wild light in his father's eyes, gypsy green and second-sighted.  Perhaps she had tried to prepare him.

Tinker flicked out the stand and swung a leg over the tank, letting 'Poke' pulse away quietly with her Edison/Splitdorf magneto on retard.  His casual glance took in everything: aurochs grazing complacently on the village green, the fecund smells of everyday magic about its legitimate business, even faint music in the air.  Yet he heard no liquid trillings.  Birds are the most sensitive, that's why you listen for them in the mines.

Tinker blamed Poke's muted snarl and his own black aura.  He shut off the ignition with a slap.  No, not a tweet.

Something in the air, the weather.  He'd hardly noticed it changing, but now it looked like a storm brewing—and there existed pleasanter examples of that craft within.

Tinker stumped up the flags and into an empty pub.  Except for Bars himself, of course, as much a fixture as the glow-imp lighting and friendly beer-engines.

"Tinker, come right on in, dear boy."  Ever the perfect host, once you got past his melted-waxwork face and hands.  He put down the glass he'd been polishing and plucked a monocle from the pocket of his embroidered, Edwardian waistcoat.

"Hurrmp," he rumbled, smoothing out a fiery handlebar mustache.  The facial fungus being spared by the oxygen mask when his Hurricane fell flaming into, of all places… well, Fairyland.  The rest of his face and hands weren't quite so lucky.

"Not on our best form, what?"  Bars never missed the least nuance of a customer; after all, it was his business.  "Strikes me you need a jolly good drink."

Tinker smiled through his gathering gloom as the landlord bustled about the racks of exotic bottles.  Bars prided himself on having a drink for each creature and every occasion, he could raise the spirits of the dead.

Bars placed a cobwebbed litre bottle in front of Tinker.  German script fading off the label; something like 'Alt Wermuth' although it didn't look like vermouth old or new.  Tinker thumbed back the old style wire 'n porcelain stopper carefully and sniffed.  Wormwood for its vermifugent qualities; in ancient Anglo-Saxon, wermode—the mind preserver.

"Ahem," coughed Bars.  "That's just a chaser to wash the dust from your throat.  I know you appreciate a fine Swiss Pontarlier absinthe, and those crafty Hun brew-meisters employ Dusty Miller instead of decent Kent hops."

"What, you're serving green-fairy beer, and it's not even St. Patrick's?" Tinker exclaimed.

Bars, however, had scurried away to rummage down the far end.  "With you in a tick… always seem to forget where I put it… ah hah!"  He emerged with a flask that appeared to have been carved from a block of solid granite.

"There."  Bars set it down before Tinker, and blew on his fire-reduced fingers.  "One of the hell-waters.  Rather nippy, I'm afraid."

Tinker could see his breath frosting in the air around it.

"Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, kindest in all that cruel place." Bars stated.  "Best this establishment can offer for broken hearts."

Tinker stared morosely at him.  "That obvious, is it?"

Bars smiled, exposing pre-war dentistry.  "Who learns the woes of man better than a barkeep, what?"  He laid a finger alongside the candle stub of his nose.  "Wouldn't believe the sob stories I've heard… still, mum's the word."

Tinker pushed away the stone flask, cursing as he had to unstick his fingers.  "Well, I ain't sobbing yet and I think I'll pass on the liquid shock treatment."

Bars sighed.  "Pity, it's the very best nepethene, can't even feel it going down.  I'll just put it to one side in case you change your mind."

"Not me," said Tinker, putting on a brave face, no small effort as he'd just taken his first swig of the Wermuth.  "Nothing gets me down."  He caught his reflection in the bar mirror: wind-tousled jet shot with silver lightning framing weathered features, green-pool eyes where any child could see the lie.  "Well, not for long anyway."

The wormwood beer tasted bitter as strong medicine should, not that it could kill the bug eating away up his arse.  He'd been dumped like a dollop of dog-shit.  Desire had simply used Sarah to have her way with him, and then pulled the plug.  Sure, a sympathetic ear would help, alcohol and drugs dull the pain, fights and fast riding distract.  But nothing would bring Sarah back and she'd taken a lot of him away with her.  He couldn't shake the darkness that gathered around him, never felt so close to despairing.

Tinker heard the door open behind him and saw Bars stiffen.

"Your date, I think, Tinker", he whispered, "I'd better find her a drink."  He moved discreetly down the bar, before disappearing around a corner that hadn't been there a moment ago.  He did it rather too quickly.

Tinker froze.  He knew his 'Orphee'--don't turn around; don't even glance in the mirror.  He heard the wet slap of bare feet on oak boards.  Tinker carried over two-hundred pounds of red meat and black leather, but they'd never creaked like that for him.

"…skin as white as leprosy, the nightmare life-in death was she…"  Coleridge had worked himself up to a bottle and a half of laudanum a day.  He'd heard Despair treading close behind him too.

 Tinker set the shoulders, and turned to face his fate.  

Either a transsexual sumo-wrestler who'd slept too long with the fishes, or the personification of all human miseries had stopped in for a quick one.

"Buy a girl a drink?" she asked coyly.

Just when you think it can't possibly get worse!  Tinker thought.  However, a sharp gutter-mage never misses the opportunity to create an honour debt with his betters.  Tinker slipped the ring from off his finger.  A coiled silver snake biting its own tail; a memory of Sarah, her last gift.  She'd lived to suck and had no shame.  Went at it like she'd been possessed--unfortunately, she had.  It was time for her ring to go too.

 "Bars," Tinker rapped silver hard on the mahogany countertop, "my lady Despair's pleasure."

Summoned to his duties by the promise of moon-metal, their reluctant host reappeared carrying a miniature bottle like something from a doll's house.  He placed a faceted-jet shot glass before Despair and carefully poured out a tiny, crystal-clear tot.

"Sorry about the short measure, very last drop too," Bars murmured apologetically.  "They were so small, you see."

Despair stretched out a swollen hand and conveyed the glass to her cruel, boar-tusked mouth.  Broad nostrils twitched their protruding black hairs; sunken, blood-shot eyes blinked surprise as she tasted.  

"Tears from the Children's Crusade," she cawed like a corpse-blessed crow, "so pure, so…so utter."   Despair sipped it in an ecstasy of loathing.  "My compliments to your cellar."

Sarah's snake ring now resided in Bars' waistcoat pocket.  Despair's sigil-ring, however, resembled a sharpened fish-hook.  The despairing are often cutters, her body was cross-hatched with its scars like a net.  She caught all the silly fishes in a web of wounds.

Tinker collected himself and raised a glass of worm's-bane.  "To pain and suffering—endless, of course."

"Perhaps if I put on some suitable music?"  Bars murmured.  "I may safely assume you have a palate for the blues, m'lady."  He diplomatically slipped away again before either could object.  

Presently the strains of 'T.B. Blues' emerged from the throats of hidden speakers.  Tinker felt his fingers twitch in muscle-memory and form chords culled from an old Folkways 'Leadbelly' album.  The consumptive street-walker's futureless lament and sung by a knife-scarred, two-time convicted murderer who died of progressive nerve-death. 

"It's too late, too late, too late…" hammered six pairs of high-strung metal voices driven by tin picks on powerful cotton-picking fingers.

Tell me about it, thought Tinker bitterly.  Despair being pig-grunting ugly was only her physical manifestation of the horrors within.   Still and all, he reasoned, we only get the gods we create.

"So," Tinker asked conversationally, "how's business?"

"Can't complain," Despair hacked, spitting a bloody something into a cuspidor that appeared before whatever hit the floor.  "Plenty hopeless people, and drugs really bringing the customers my way.  Hasn't been so good since before the opium wars."

"From the peaks of Desire to the slough of Despair, eh?" Tinker observed drily.  "The twins got it sewn up tighter than a tummy-tuck."  

Despair cackled.  "You're just bitter."

"As alum," he agreed, raising his bottle in another toast.  "Wormwood and gall."

Despair regarded him from eyes like fissures in stone.  "A brave front lasts only so long.  You'll not find me so easy to deny as Desire."  Her glance strayed to the bar mirror and a cholera-black tongue slid, slug-like, over her tusks.  "I see them all crumble from the other side… then, instead of their reflection, they see me."

Tinker cursed and popped his knuckles.  "It's all just a game to fill the endless hours, isn't it?  And somehow we're always the losers."  He grimaced.  "Just cards in a rigged deck, eh?"

Despair scowled.  Junkies, spendthrifts, libertines and the chronically unlucky all came to her honestly, and by their own fervent efforts.  She sliced at her cheek thoughtfully with the hook-ring.  "Wouldst hazard a set of trumps with me to prove?"

Tinker saw his error too late.  He'd called the cheat, she calls the weapons.

"Cards," Despair demanded, rapping a talon on the counter.  

A section slid open revealing a deck, larger than a regular pack and very much older.  The Tarot showed up in 14th century Europe, probably brought from India via Egypt.  By gypsies of his father's blood, in all likelihood--Despair sure liked to rub it in.

The cards fluttered, shuffling and shifting like the blades of a turbo-fan on idle.  Despair turned to Tinker, and her smirk made slush of his blood.  "The first card represents you."

Tinker reached out a hand and stilled the cards.  He flipped the first one face-up on the bar.

'Le Fou'- the fool.  A dreamer in motley, all his possessions in a hanky, was about to step off a precipice, ignoring the dog frantically trying to pull him back.

Despair sneered confidently.  "Can you deny yourself?"

Tinker shook his head.  He'd played the fool over Sarah, heedless of warnings.  Yeah, nothing like an old one.  Despair sat at the elbow of all gamblers, she knew every trick and deal.  He'd learnt the cards from Magic John--it would have to be enough, that and fool's luck. 

 "Okay, okay.  I'm the querent, postulant, and idiot-savant.  The aleph of air-heads," Tinker muttered.  "But the play has just begun."

Despair grunted.  She was very patient and invariably won in the end.  Her claws peeled off the next card like skin and laid it left of 'Le Fou'.

'Les Amoureux'-the lovers.

Tinker felt his heart lurch, second card stated the situation.  Gemini, the tricky twinning of opposites.  Hell had Agony and Ecstasy wrapped up in razor wire, he had Desire and Despair wrapped around him like anacondas on a caduceus.  He'd take his chances with the wire any day.

"The card of choices," whispered Despair, inching closer.  "And none to trust for counsel."

Tinker's guts began churning, but from an inner voice that spoke to him, and him alone.  

"Trust yersel' an' shame no yer kin."  Iain, his all-too-familiar resident ancestor, a Pictish battle-smiter with zero sophistication in the arts, black or otherwise.  Iain cramped him again.  "Cast the runes man, an' bide their fa'."

Tinker snapped out of indecision and forced himself to take up his card.  It would describe where he stood.

'Le Pendu'- fucking great.  The hanged man dangling from his right leg, the left crossed at the knee like on a tomb's brass-rubbing to indicate the knight had been a crusader.  The cross, the tree, that sacrifice which is necessary for enlightenment.  Another one for her.

Despair's hand twitched eagerly for the fourth card, it held his potential future.

'La Tour'- old pride's lonely tower cast down by lightning, a bonfire of vanities and false beliefs.  Mars the merciless.

Despair actually smiled; out of practice, and it creaked in her voice.  "Destruction."  She took the card from Tinker's nerveless fingers and placed it above the last.  "Another of mine, I think."

Now Tinker started sweating and even Iain lay low.  He dragged out reaching for the next card; this would be his only other possible future, and how he dreaded it.

'Le Mage'.  It twisted impatiently from his fingers and flipped away to land above 'Les Amoreux'.

Despair snorted like a startled pig.  She hadn't expected the magus to turn up.

"Magic John," breathed Tinker.  "I knew you wouldn't let a mate down."  

The naked silver man with winged heels and a familiar face might have flown off the Isle of Man T.T. motorcycle trophy.    John's way of reminding a fool to juggle his powers: the worldly disc and chalice of love, the wand of spirit with intellect's blade.  "Earth, water, fire and air," hummed Tinker, "met together in a garden fair."  Maybe he had a chance after all.

"Mercury, patron of glib thieves," grumbled Despair, making a note to bestow a very personal visit on Magic John in the near future.  Something to look forward to--that, and her next card.

'L' Arts'- it should have been Temperance, unfortunately Crowley knew little of such and this deck had more than a dark flavour of that Great Beast.  It showed a female angel blending fire with water; the card of alchemy and transmutation.  On another level it became Sagittarius, the wise man/beast centaur working arrow and bow to his will.  It could pierce the armoured past and change an outcome.  All it cost was an old life for new.

"You haven't the discipline," scoffed Despair.  "You'd have to sacrifice the lovers, cut Sarah from your heart." 

 Tinker swallowed.  He knew the truth when he heard it, and him only a dirty little monkey with shaky hands. Nevertheless, survival rules; whatever holds you in the trap, when fire approaches you reach for the knife.  He hardened himself.  "Flesh ever comes at a price."

Despair smirked.  She usually got her cut.

"And yet we just keep on coming back, better every time too.  We are building a staircase to the stars, each step a body," Tinker continued.  "Evo-bloody-lution." 

 He laid his hand on the seventh and last card.

Despair's grave-digging fingers twitched, her smile grew less certain.  A card beyond her control, one already cast; it signified his karma.

'La Lune'-sinister and fish-slippery.  A scarab bore the sun-Ra through dark waters of night under a cold-eyed moon.  The card of passage, of magic and madness. Death stands close by, for this card could be nightmare.  The vast unconsciousness of Dream to be crossed before a new day can dawn.  Terra incognito, over the edge, here be dragons.

Tinker pushed away from the bar and stared at the cards.  They didn't look good, everything pointed to a swirl down the bowl.  Only the five-wits between him and possession now.

  He reluctantly raised his eyes to meet Despair's.  He'd seen warmer in a fish-freezer.

"Well," Tinker muttered.  "The house cards can't lie, I guess you win."  He regarded his empty bottle morosely.  "Do we have time for a last drink?"

Despair rubbed her corpse-hands together in satisfaction.  "My round, I believe."  She took her fish-hook ring and dug a scar into the mahogany.  "Service."

Bars appeared from the cellar, although Tinker hadn't seen him sneak down there.  He took in Tinker's tarot at a glance, then gazed at him with some concern.

"One from that bottle you were recommending earlier and another worm-beer for me," Tinker ordered, quickly adding, "Lady's treat."

A fire-rearranged eyebrow rose imperceptibly, but Bars produced the granite bottle and filled a small crystal glass shaped like a poppy pod.

Despair accepted it, and passed her glass over the tarot.  She smirked, raising a toast to Tinker. "I drink to your fortune."  Her eyes were drinking in his face, crumpled in defeat.  She liked the proud ones.  The bigger they were, the better the fall.

Tinker rallied himself with obvious effort and extended a none-too-steady hand to clink drinks.  "Bottoms up," he managed in a mere husk of his voice.

She shot hers down in triumph.  Tinker savoured a mouthful of his green beer with eyes closed--the worms weren't going to have him today after all.

When Tinker opened his eyes, Despair was setting down her empty glass with some hesitation, like she knew the taste and yet couldn't somehow recall it.  She looked vaguely at the cards, and then turned to Tinker.

"Uh… what was I saying?" she asked.

Tinker smiled broadly at Bars and winked.  "You were just telling us you were for the off," he lied glibly.  "Here, I'll see you to the door."

He steered her out into the hallway, Bars waving the spotted silk hanky he had been discreetly mopping his brow with.  Then she stopped, immovable as an albino hippo, in front of the full-length mirror. 

 "I…is that me?" she asked, a quaver in her voice.

Tinker got behind as she bent closer, staring in horror at her bloodless, bloated face.  Some things are beyond human power to resist.

His size twelve engineer's boot planted itself firmly against a steatopygic, cratered arse, and thrust like a winning goal for Scotland.  "My regards to the family."

The mirror's surface parted like a pool of mercury and closed behind her with scarce a ripple.  Tinker pulled the thick velvet curtain from a window and draped it over the mirror.  He walked inside, leant heavily on the counter, and let out his breath.  

Bars looked even more like an over-heated waxwork and his big silk kerchief was sopping.  "She'll not forget that," he observed.

"Not meant to," Tinker grunted.  "Those twisted sisters been kicking me about enough.  Buggered if I know why, that's what I get for helping their little girl."

"You gave Di-Di back something the twins have lost utterly and forever," Bars said.  "Innocence."  He sighed, and began coaxing the cards back into the pack.  "You'll never have had siblings, to my guess."     

Bars held up 'Le Fou'. "You have just stepped off the precipice."  He tapped a tallow finger on the fool's crude pack.  "Here are all the elemental suites: the planetary discs, cups of water, wands of fire, and airy swords.  You've cocked a leg against the big dogs and yet barely know how to keep your balls in the air; the foolish, grass-green virgin who treads where angels fear."

Tinker sighed and scanned the rows of exotic bottles.  "Don't suppose you have anything for severe pain?"

Bars teased his eponymous mustachios.  "Well, there's always Brompton's cocktail," he mused aloud.

"Yeah, with a chemo chaser," grumbled Tinker.  "I ain't terminal yet."

Bars smiled.  "Of course not, Tinker, just don't go trusting your luck is endless."


End file.
